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The Black Cat Mental Illness

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Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Black Cat” is an iconic short story of a man who struggles with mental illness and through Poe’s use of an unreliable narrator, the subliminal psychological and biographic approach is strongly reflected in this work. Due to Poe being a man that faced numerous struggles in his life, his writing pieces reflect his own life through the narrator’s actions. “The Black Cat” authored by the pivotal gothic author, Edgar Allan Poe, is a short story in which the author subconsciously associates himself as the narrator both from his own hardships from various life events, as well as his struggle with addiction and mental illness. The author, born Edgar Poe, became orphaned as only a young toddler when both his mother …show more content…

While Poe tells the reader that his anger resides in his cat, his wife’s resistance of murdering the cat only …show more content…

The narrator early describes how victimized he feels, and that he must admit his guilt and repent for his actions, alluding to the reader sympathizing with him. Poe writes that the narrator must “free my soul from the horrible weight which lies upon it. But listen! Listen, and you shall hear how I have been destroyed” (Poe 34). Poe attempts to evoke a sense of sorrow early in this story, before the reader continues to realize that the repentance is due to the narrator having murdered his wife and cats. The syntax in which Poe writes, shows a dehumanization of his wife after murdering her, and before his execution by death penalty was “hoping to exonerate himself” (Piacentino). The feeling of such hatred and abhorrence against his wife that the narrator exhibited, Poe likely included in this story and was due to her “showing unconditional love toward the cat, the same kind of attention and love animals had once shown toward him” (Piacentino). Through Poe’s writing, he included this subconsciously, as he too, may have felt unloved or rejected because of the numerous losses he encountered in his short life – including his parents, and his

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After he killed Pluto he found love for a cat that did not exist but brought home and cared for it. After a while the cat starts to enrage Poe’s character again and tries to kill it, but ends up

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In the story, the narrator attacks and wounds his cat while he is extremely drunk. He is overcome with the ‘fiery demon of alcohol’, much like Poe became before he died. In short, Poe’s life was rather terrible, and it’s apparent that these dark events in his life stimulated his unique and creepy style of writing, which is what he’s famous

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Here he reflects upon his childhood of a cat and the story drastically changes to where he kills this cat. The inspiration of his cat leads to mental unsteadiness to where he kills his wife in the end. " Sat, the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder" (Poe 14). The power of government establishes the laws. Therefore he had broken them when commuting murder to his cat for animal abuse, and first degree murder for his wife.

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For example, after the narrator gouges his cat's eye out, the cat becomes petrified of him. As a result the narrator ". . .slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree" (Poe 9). The narrator's reasoning for this was his incessant drinking and short temperament, although that is hardly an excuse. Later on in the story, the narrator finds another cat, who he also attempts to kill for no good reason.

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The Black Cat Throughout the text Edgar Allen Poe uses rhetorical devices to convey the message to the readers. In the Black Cat, Poe uses metaphor, paradox, symbolism, foreshadowing, irony, repetition, and similes to explore the themes of death, violence, and terror. In the story “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe, the author uses narrative rhetorical devices to make the story more tense, suspenseful, and suspicious. The most literary device the author used in the story was symbolism. It underlines hidden messages that contribute to the plot development and the themes of death, violence, and terror.

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One can hear the guilt in Narrator 's confessions. However, he does not seem to understand that he is the reason of why the evil deeds occurred, blaming his pets for the tragedy. He states that if not for the cat, the crime scene would not have become so violent. Throughout reading the story, the readers begin

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The story continues with an event that is unfortunately far more terrible and unexpected than the previous events. The narrator allows his increasing anger towards the second black cat to lead him to killing his wife. His temper and hatred that began with the second black cat eventually ended up impacted him and his wife. The narrator states, “I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan” (Poe 5).

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Also, when reading “ The Black Cat”, Poe will not keep the reader up-to-date with the natural world. He likes to keep his readers guessing. This alone makes the narrator unreliable. When the Black Cat came back after the narrator killed it, both he and the reader were very shocked.

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Homicidal narrators. Reincarnated cats. Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are set apart from others because of his unique style of engaging the reader in more mystery, gothic horror, and morbid literary genres, such as Poe’s short story, “The Black Cat”. This is about a narrator who is driven to maltreat his pets because of his intoxication. After murdering his cat Pluto, he then finds a stray who looks identical to Pluto, except it has a mark on its chest, resembling the outline of a gallow.

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Edgar Allan Poe is an author known for his mysterious and dark tones in writing and “The Black Cat” is no exception. It is not unusual for Poe’s characters to be experiencing some type of nervous breakdown or thoughts that point toward a mental illness, which Poe himself struggled greatly with, as well as with alcoholism. “The Black Cat '' specifically is centered around a character and his experience with alcoholism. The narrator takes the reader through what he claims is his version of the murder of his wife and cat, which he himself committed. In Edgar Allan Poe's “The Black Cat” the narrator's alcoholism and horrific actions fuel his eventual break of madness as he attempts to garner sympathy from the reader and manipulate them with his

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The darkness in “The Tell-Tale Heart'' is ubiquitous; moreover, much of Poe’s dark writing was derived from his morbid childhood. In an article on psychoanalytic criticism, the author Sarah Moll writes “Childhood experiences are extremely influential and, to a large degree, shape a person’s psyche, according to Freud” (Moll). Growing up, Poe faced many hardships from the death of his parents to the death of his wife. As a result, he experienced solitude and isolation which impacted his expression of superego in his writing. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe shows the impact of his dark childhood as he writes about killing an old man to rid himself of the agony the man’s eye brings him.

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In the gruesome short story “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe a nameless narrator tells his story of his drunken and moody life before he gets hung the next day. The intoxicated narrator kills his favorite cat, Pluto and his wife with an axe. Soon enough, the narrator gets caught and there he ends up, in jail. Although, most readers of “The Black Cat” have argued the narrators insanity, more evidence have shown that he is just a moody alcoholic with a lousy temper.

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Edgar Allan Poe’s life was marked by tragedy and loss, sorrow and madness. “The Raven,” written by Poe, is a haunting narrative poem which reflects his own personal struggles with grief, propelling him into despair and madness. The tragic life experiences of Edgar Allan Poe are reflected in his writing “The Raven,” specifically how they related to madmen, murder and melancholy. The madmen theme is reflected in Poe’s struggle with mental illness and depression.

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1399 Words | 6 Pages

Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Black Cat immerses the reader into the mind of a murdering alcoholic. Poe himself suffered from alcoholism and often showed erratic behavior with violent outburst. Poe is famous for his American Gothic horror tales such as the Tell-Tale Heart and the fall of the House of Usher. “The Black Cat is Poe’s second psychological study of domestic violence and guilt. He added a new element to aid in evoking the dark side of the narrator, and that is the supernatural world.”

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Edgar Allan Poe addresses the dark and gruesome side of human nature in his writing “The Black Cat”, which during that time and even now are perceived as radical ideas. This dark human nature is displayed in Poe’s writing as the narrator recalls the happenings of a most erratic event. The narrator, a pet lover with a sweet disposition, in this story succumbs to the most challenging aspects of human nature including that of addiction, anger, and perverseness. To the Christian believer, human’s sinful flesh leads people to do wrong because that is their natural tendency.

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